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This week in Journals.Ars

The Journals have really been picking up lately and the writers are definitely noticing and appreciating the increased levels of discussion and participation: even the trolls are amusing! Please continue to help us out and supply us with all the dialogue, diverse points of view, and witty lollerskates-variations you can come up with. Just kidding, we love our readers! Now on to the round-up:

M-Dollar

Things are moving quickly in the M-Dollar Journal. Microsoft has been launching a number of products and Josh tried to catch as many as he could. First up, Microsoft took its software on the road this past week and was showing off its newly minted "Microsoft Shareware Starter Kit" which provides a standard set of components, forms, and code that shareware developers normally have to spend time coding themselves. These include registration services, serial number code, exception handling reporting, product feedback and more. Secondly, Microsoft announced Windows Automotive 5.0. This version of Windows is especially tailored to running in an automotive setting and it is currently being used in several high-end cars, but should expand to more mid-range vehicles within a year or two.

Opposable Thumbs

Ben was very impressed with a "machinima" made completely within a Half-Life 2 level. The scene pays homage to the famous "A Few Good Men" courtroom scene and uses the G-man as the Marine on trial. OT readers are discussing whether or not video games will continue to get more expensive as time goes on. There are several points of view and valid ideas on all sides of this discussion. Some are arguing that prices will stay the same as game companies become more efficient and others believe that prices will continue to balloon due to the increasing complexity of the platform and sheer number of people that it takes to incorporate wiz-bang features from each new console.

Infinite Loop

Apple got a lot of good vibes this week after they released their third quarter FY2005 results. The results exceeded what most people had expected, but the real star of the show was, again, the iPod. Apple sold over 6,000,000 iPods in the past three months, compared to around 5,000,000 the prior quarter. Apple also posted record profits and revenues, congrats! The open source WebKit project is gaining momentum with developers. One fruit of their labor is that one developer has ported KDE's KSVG library to Webkit. This will open the door for SVG support in Safari, but don't get your hopes up. I wouldn't expect to see proper and stable SVG document support in an official release for quite a while.

Would you still buy tracks from the iTunes music store if your university gave you unlimited free access to a competitor's product? The students at the University of Rochester would. Surveys done by the University showed that seven out of 10 students still bought iTunes tracks even though they have unfettered access to Napster's service. Finally, Om Malik wrote up a piece on the benefits of developing software for the Mac. He gave the Gizmo project—an open-source, cross-platform VoIP app—as an example of developing a better product because of its exposure on the Mac platform.

That's all for this installment. Keep your eyes on the Journals for daily updates and keep tabs on the front page next weekend for my next weekly roundup. Have a great week!